Politicool: Alex Wagner

She's edited a hipster music mag, called George Clooney boss, and now she's…a DC pundit? Alex Wagner (and the female-friendly MSNBC) proves that you don't have to be a hectoring middle-aged guy to catch the Beltway beat

Alex Wagner is a fan of President Barack Obama, but she'd really like him to stop interrupting her TV show. It's the Wednesday before Christmas, and Wagner, a music magazine editor turned issues director for George Clooney's Not On Our Watch turned MSNBC anchor, is sitting behind the sleek desk at her new noon-hour political chat show, Now With Alex Wagner. Producers have gotten word that the President plans to give a quick press conference, and Wagner must break from her panel discussion on House Speaker John Boehner's payroll tax–cut debacle to cover it. So far, though, the feed consists only of White House press secretary Jay Carney droning on. Wagner crosses her arms and shifts impatiently in her seat. "Wake me up when Obama is on," she groans.

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Wagner, who is 34 but looks 26, is young to have her own TV show, but it's the way she harnesses her youth that sets her apart. Wagner's peers sometimes overcorrect for the age and gender bias by dressing like Barbara Walters, using superwonky political jargon, and/or shellacking their hair into the female anchor's notorious helmet-head. Wagner's neat bob actually moves, and she wears Chelsea boots with her tweed skirts. All the signifiers of Wagner's age and hipster résumé—her short attention span, multigenre mental limberness, occasional bouts of petulance (like when the President hijacks her schedule), and willingness to go sleeveless on camera—are crucial to her brand. "My goal is to show the intermingling between politics and pop culture," Wagner later explains. "Kim Kardashian's excuse about why she got her divorce is, for better or worse, just as interesting and relevant as Herman Cain's withdrawal from the [presidential] race."

The poster girl for MSNBC is, of course, Rachel Maddow, a firebrand who embodies the network's left-of-center ideology while also being the funny, relatable buddy you want at your birthday dinner. But nearly half of the network's full-time commentators are women, and they're an impressively diverse group—demographically, sure, but also personality-wise. Former MSNBC host and current Today cohost Savannah Guthrie has to be the most sardonic (but likable) woman ever to appear on mainstream morning TV. The network nurtured the career of hard-hitting Irish girl/power mom Norah O'Donnell, now the chief White House correspondent for CBS News. And then there's Morning Joe's Mika Brzezinski, whose patrician mommy persona allows her to joke about pill popping and boozing and then interview heads of state. "I want variety," says network president Phil Griffin. "I want women, I want diversity, and I want youth. The idea that there's a look for an anchorperson, or a certain background, or you've got to put in your years, or you need a certain blow-dryer for your hair—we don't do any of that."

MSNBC seems to be promoting broadcast feminism 2.0: Female anchors are encouraged to be fully themselves, which is to say aggressive and domineering when that's called for, emotional (Brzezinski practically shed tears of anger over Newt Gingrich's barb that Occupy Wall Street protesters should "go get a job after you take a bath") and flirtatious when that suits. This formula couldn't be better for Wagner. "Music journalism is a boys' club," she says. "You learn to look at brazenly misogynist behavior, give it the middle finger, and keep moving. But it's the reverse sexism that concerns me more. The higher you climb in the media, the issue is being good to other women. I've been fortunate to have a few really talented, strong female bosses who've encouraged me along the way. I've also been around women who haven't been particularly supportive. There's a hardness that develops. I want to hold on to whatever warmth I have and throw logs on that fire."

Meeting in executive producer Dana Haller's office after the show, Wagner and her team bat around potential end-of-the-year packages. Discussing a "GOP Saviors" segment, Wagner busts out a spot-on impression of Donald Trump. A minute later, she wonders if the show has sufficiently mocked Obama's jeans, suggests Kim Jong Il's jumpsuits for inclusion in a men's fashion feature, and skewers Republican candidate Rick Santorum, whom she calls "Steady Eddie" (the cringe-inducing nickname he gave himself). "We should put Santorum's fucking sweater-vests in there 'cause that was just...." She trails off, grinning widely. "The fact that he's like, `I'm Steady Eddie, and I have man-breasts!' "

Wagner is uniquely conditioned to see politics as pop culture and politicians as celebrities. She grew up in Washington, DC, the daughter of prominent Democratic operative Carl Wagner, who has ties to the Kennedys and Clintons. "There's always been this orbit of political strategists in my house," Wagner recalls over lobster Cobb salad at a French bistro in Rockefeller Center, where Now is filmed live. "I was interested in politics, but I hated the idea of staying in Washington and working for a senator or being a flack. I thought, This machine is incredibly stale and not sexy. In DC, it's really edgy to listen to Kanye West or Jay-Z, and it's a thing to know who Azzedine Alaïa is—you know what I mean? But I do care about issues, and I was really political in high school, always marching."

After graduating from Brown in 1999, Wagner decided to move to L.A. Although she wanted to work in magazines, she says she just couldn't stomach joining the postcollegiate mass exodus to New York City and "living in some crappy apartment in Williamsburg." In L.A. for an apartment- and job-hunting trip with her dad, Wagner "went to a newsstand and asked what magazines are published in California." The answer was Ray Gun and Bikini, copublished fringe-culture titles. "We were driving around, and I told my dad to pull over so I could use a pay phone." She got the magazines' number from information and cold-called them. "I was like, `I want to be an intern and then an editor.' They were like, `Who is this?' " But she got an internship that led to a job.

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Such brazen initiative definitely can help you get ahead in journalism, but those who possess it—and land in the hallowed realm of television punditry—too often turn into rigid ideologues or intellectual thrill junkies bent solely on provocation. "What's refreshing about Alex is that she is earnestly and seriously interested in the substance of politics, yet she makes no attempt to pretend to know stuff she doesn't," says MSNBC political commentator and New York magazine contributor John Heilemann, a frequent guest on Now. "There's a lot of people frontin' on cable TV—to use one of the young people's terms. Alex says, `I'm smart, and I care about this, but I'm not going to act like I'm more of a political pro than I am.' "

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Now is still in its infancy, and Wagner and her producers are just zeroing in on the regular guests and signature segments that will define the hour. "What Just Happened?!" is a blooper reel/week in review, for instance; "PS" is Wagner's sign-off monologue. Poverty is a big topic, as is immigration. "I feel strongly about this as the first-generation American on my mom's side," Wagner says. (Her mother is from Burma, her father from Iowa.) But what Wagner and her producers are aiming for is a watchable magnification and dissemination of her personality: "sassy, savvy, and smart," in Heilemann's words. When the show is flowing, it swings with a breezy, unpretentious ease. "You guys talk about [Mitt Romney] as a sort of merry prankster, not in the Ken Kesey sense but as someone who dressed up as a cop in high school and played practical jokes on his friends," Wagner quipped while interviewing the authors of The Real Romney. "I mean, that guy—I don't know where that guy is."

Because Wagner isn't out there maniacally spewing high-octane opinions, when she does have something controversial to say, it feels authentic. "I'm going to be pilloried for this, but I think, Get rid of the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms," Wagner told Bill Maher with a defiant smile when, during an episode of Real Time, he asked his guests what they'd change in the Constitution. "In the grand scheme of rights that we have—the right of assembly, free speech—owning a gun does not tally on the same level." This video is now among the most googled things about Wagner, after her bio but before "Alex Wagner hot."

Wagner talks about the series of events that brought her from that Los Angeles pay phone to MSNBC's soundstage as if it were the most natural progression in the world. This isn't as obnoxious as it sounds. Wagner does have the precocious air of a near millennial raised to believe she's special and can do anything, but she clearly works hard to make good on the faith others have in her. Ray Gun led to a stint at New York's Japanese culture magazine Tokion, followed by the well-heeled, literarily inclined young person's urge to "take a stab at writing the great American novel." (Her mom was working for a Dutch bank in Amsterdam, so she joined her.)

A few months later, back in DC, Wagner met with her enviably prestigious brain trust of "wise older sages," including John Podesta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, who'd just founded the research and advocacy group Center for American Progress. He hired her as Minister of Culture, a job that was exactly as vague as it sounds. "Washington is a tiny town that often doesn't look beyond its own two feet," Wagner says. "They wanted people who would utilize all forms of media—this is before Twitter, right as the Internet was cresting—they wanted someone who was going to, for lack of a better term, make it a little sexier." A year and a half later, friends at hipster music bible The Fader asked her to come aboard. She eventually became editor in chief.

In 2007 Wagner received another fairy-tale phone call. George Clooney was starting a nonprofit to draw attention to humanitarian issues worldwide. "I was going to meet with George at his hotel, and I remember thinking, This is the most nerve-racking job interview ever. I went and bought, like, a Phillip Lim dress for the occasion. I was wearing alligator heels, and the very tip of the heel got knocked off. I'm meeting George Clooney, and my heel's broken!"
In the late 2000s, Wagner traveled to the Chad-Sudan border with Clooney, to Zimbabwe with Matt Damon, and, when the actors were shooting films, she met them in hotels to discuss funding underground journalists in Burma or motorcycle medics in Sudan. "It was rewarding and weird," Wagner says. "You go from being at the Venice film festival with Clooney and Pitt, which is a star-studded, overwhelming thing, and then you're dealing with some of the most impoverished, troubled places in the world." With his usual sardonic flair, Clooney says of Wagner: "It's not surprising that Alex is such a success on her show. I've traveled to some of the roughest parts of the world with her, dangerous places such as Washington, DC, and the UN Security Council. We also went to Chad and the Sudan—but that was much safer. I can't speak highly enough about how helpful she was in trying to raise the volume on the atrocities in Darfur."

As a privileged DC kid, Wagner had the luxury of worrying that working in politics would turn her into a dorky wonk, but Not On Our Watch showed her this was a false conceit, she says, that she didn't have to abandon pop culture. "This is going to sound crass, but it reassures me that I still want to get the new Girls album—that's never going to change. I've gotten more confident that I can pursue all of those interests and weave them in, and I don't have to, like, be cool, you know?"

In 2010, when then AOL-owned blog Politics Daily called (yes, another unsolicited job offer) to ask Wagner if she'd like to cover the White House, she jumped at the challenge. "In my third month I was on pool duty with the President and King Abdullah," Wagner says. "I'm supposed to be the person keeping the written record for the print media, and meanwhile I'm thinking, King Abdullah's robe is so gold! Look at the plants! I'm in the Oval Office! This is so crazy! And then it's like, Wagner, wake up, this is a job. Middle East peace."

In television Wagner found her medium. Within a year of joining Politics Daily (where she did video segments), she was on contract at MSNBC, appearing on air several times a week. In the summer of 2011 Phil Griffin floated the idea of giving Wagner her own show. "Even my agent was like, `Down the line,' " Wagner says. "But Phil was like, `No, let's do it.' " She didn't have time to come undone, she says. By November Wagner was checking out schematics for her anchor desk. "The show is like one of those pellets you drop in a glass of water and it turns into a sponge animal," she jokes. "At first it was like, `Just don't screw up the teleprompter.' But now we're getting to the show's DNA, which is more reflective of my background." Wagner mentions bringing in writers from Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and other outside-the-Beltway publications as "one way we distinguish ourselves," but it's Wagner herself who actually sets Now apart. "It's about the unstuffy sensibility that isn't freaked out by a president who in 2008 could make reference to Jay-Z's `Dirt Off My Shoulder' in a speech," Heilemann says. "There are a lot of people inside politics who were like, `What the fuck? Barack Obama is referencing a rapper?' That's seen as outré."

Put two and two together, and you've got an outré insider. That's a position Wagner almost surely would embrace—and, like the president she's battling for airtime, therein lies her power.